There have been 673 allegations of anti-Semitism by Labour Party members and, since the new general secretary started a crackdown on this issue back in April 2018, 296 members have either been expelled, sanctioned, or have resigned. Some 227 have been cleared of these accusations, and 150 cases are still under investigation, according to the Guardian.

Even if all of those 150 turn out to be guilty of anti-Semitism, it will still mean that just 0.08 percent of Labour’s half-a-million members have said or tweeted something anti-Semitic. This clearly shows the allegations that Labour is institutionally anti-Semitic are just not true. So, how did this all come about?

Following the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour’s leader, I was doing interviews about whether we could win the next general election, as I was one of the few members prepared to defend Jeremy. Until February 2016, I was not asked whether there was anti-Semitism in the party. Indeed, since I joined the party in February 1969, I never heard anything anti-Semitic and was only aware of one racist comment in 1970 when a party member denounced the song ‘Young, Gifted and Black.’ A few weeks later, he resigned from the party.

It was only when the election of the NEC’s youth delegate started that the issue of anti-Semitism arose. Supporters of the right-wing candidate claimed that the pro-Corbyn candidate was in the Oxford Labour Club, an organization in which there had been incidents of anti-Semitism.

As Corbyn’s critics raised claims of anti-Semitism, I could not recall any Labour MP raising the issue in all my time in the party, so when I was asked if there was a problem with anti-Semitism, I said I had never heard or seen anything anti-Semitic in my half century in the party. This view was supported in April 2016, when 80 Jewish Labour Party members published a letter in the Guardian, stating that they had never heard or seen anything anti-Semitic during all their time in the party.

In a BBC radio interview at 9am, I was asked whether what Hitler did was illegal. There is no relevance between the horrors of the Holocaust and the current Labour Party, so I dismissed this in a few words by simply saying that, in the 1930s, Hitler had supported Zionism before he went mad and killed six........